But the chief seat of these fearful commotions was once more Sicily
with its plantations and its hordes of slaves brought thither from
Asia Minor. It is significant of the greatness of the evil, that
an attempt of the government to check the worst iniquities of the
slaveholders was the immediate cause of the new insurrection. That
the free proletarians in Sicily were little better than the slaves,
had been shown by their attitude in the first insurrection;(8)
after it was subdued, the Roman speculators took their revenge and
reduced numbers of the free provincials into slavery.

In consequence
of a sharp enactment issued against this by the senate in 650, Publius
Licinius Nerva, the governor of Sicily at the time, appointed a court
for deciding on claims of freedom to sit in Syracuse. The court
went earnestly to work; in a short time decision was given in eight
hundred processes against the slave-owners, and the number of causes in
dependence was daily on the increase. The terrified planters hastened
to Syracuse, to compel the Roman governor to suspend such unparalleled
administration of justice; Nerva was weak enough to let himself be
terrified, and in harsh language informed the non-free persons
requesting trial that they should forgo their troublesome demand for
right and justice and should instantly return to those who called
themselves their masters. Those who were thus dismissed, instead of
doing as he bade them, formed a conspiracy and went to the mountains.